Who thinks of the sad and the tired in the Corona crisis?

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A few days ago it was Earth Overshoot Day, also known as World Exhaustion Day or Earth Overload Day: the day of the year when people used up the natural resources that should actually be enough for them for the whole year. It is a shame, but certainly also a good thing, that such a day cannot be calculated for the energy resources of individual people, because many people probably already had their Overshoot Day sometime in April or May this year.

Margarete Stokowski, arrow to the right

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Rosanna Graf

Born in 1986, was born in Poland and grew up in Berlin. She studied philosophy and social sciences and has been working as a freelance writer since 2009. Her feminist bestseller "Unterrum frei" was published in 2016 by Rowohlt Verlag. "The last days of the patriarchy" followed in 2018, a collection of columns from SPIEGEL ONLINE and "taz".

Covid-19 makes you tired, and months later, many of those affected are too exhausted to return to normal everyday life. But the pandemic in itself is also making many of those who do not contract the coronavirus tired. And somehow there seems to be a small mismatch between the emotions or conditions that are discussed publicly and those that are less discussed. What happens a lot: all about those who are angry, ignorant or selfish. What takes place less: the tiredness, the anxiety, the sadness.

On the one hand, this is understandable. The angry are loud, the sad are quiet. Some organize demos, others don't. But can it be that we talk too much about anger?

Fear is not a big deal

In June relatively optimistic results from the study "Socio-economic factors and consequences of the spread of the coronavirus in Germany" were published: "Lonely but resilient - people coped with the lockdown better than expected," the results said. The corona crisis "did not have as negative an impact on the well-being and mental health of people living in Germany as previously assumed" - however, the publication was only about the month of April, and some time has passed since then.

Other results from the same study showed that many people in Germany far overestimate their risk of developing life-threatening Covid-19. On average, the respondents who were asked to name a number between 0 and 100 estimated that there was a probability of around 26 percent that they would get life-threatening from Covid-19. That means either that quite a few people are pretty scared of the coronavirus, or that they are just not particularly sure about using probability statements.

But if there are quite a few people who are quite afraid, then the current public debate doesn't do a very good job of mapping those fears. Is it perhaps easier to talk about egoism, to get upset about people partying and going on vacation, to discuss missing or incorrectly worn masks than about vulnerability and exhaustion, about exhausted energies and still existing fears?

There is of course not that much spectacle in these last-mentioned topics, and if I imagined I were a medium that wants to generate clicks, I would also publish a video in the direction of "So wild is partying again in some ugly park despite a pandemic" as one in the direction of "Because of Corona, this woman doesn't dare to drive the bus again or to hug her friends yet, and she is afraid of losing her job". But if I imagine that I am a society that wants to take care of everyone, I would rather look at this woman, or: how many of that kind there are actually.

I don't know if I'm friends with an above-average number of rather cautious, pessimistic people, but I've had quite a few conversations with people lately who, given the pandemic nonchalance and vacation photos of others - and not because of envy of their money - an Feel a certain tired sadness or skepticism or even bitterness about the fact that solidarity and collective learning are obviously somehow difficult. Which is not to say that everyone who has gone on vacation shows lack of solidarity. Rather: that there are people who can fix a kind of everyday life again (maybe with incredible effort, you can't see that in the holiday photos) and others who can't, and it seems to me that the latter are not really important at the moment.

Criticism can only be half of what needs to be done

For the sake of transparency, I should perhaps say that these skeptical people are emotionally much closer to me, or let's put it this way: The other day someone posted screenshots on Twitter from a Facebook event, the "Corona Afterparty", at the end of October in Berlin 8,000 confirmations and 50,000 interested parties, the Twitter user comment was: "What's going to go wrong?" and I thought: Wow, what kind of freaks are going there, and I looked for the event on Facebook and saw that 23 of my Facebook friends, some of them really close friends, were among these freaks. "Corona 2020, we survived" is the announcement of the party, and yes, that's probably called optimism.

And as I write it down, I think of my very esteemed readers, who sometimes comment under my texts that I should not always complain, but also name solutions, and of course they are always right, but in this case I would don't really want to complain, but rather ask whether we're not concentrating a little on the wrong thing at the moment.

At the weekend in Berlin Nazis will again demonstrate against protective measures and spread conspiracy theories. (Not just Nazis, of course, but also people who have no problem demonstrating alongside Nazis.) If things go the way they did last time, they'll get a lot of media and social media attention, just like they did to wish. But: Basically, it is now well known what the pandemic deniers and "lateral thinkers" stand for. It is good and right and important to criticize them, but - and here comes the only solution I have to offer - the same applies to dealing with the corona pandemic as it does to movements that want to abolish social injustice: criticism of the ruthless and ignoramuses can only be at most half of what needs to be done. The rest is taking care and reinforcing and taking care that nobody is forgotten - not even the quiet ones.